Go for the JUICE, BABY.

Double Happiness Times Two I can’t recall where I first heard that the secret to keeping life fresh was to “stay in the moment” rather than obsess on the past or future. It was in the early 1980s, when Ram Dass’ admonition to “Be Here Now” began to go mainstream in the Midwest. But the concept was so abstract; I had no idea what it meant. A few years later, I was swept into the “now” like a log in a flash flood. I was in Beijing, working at the China Daily. It was a balmy Sunday and I was meandering around the city with Andy, a British colleague; Jasper, a British friend of his; and Christine, Jasper’s Chinese interpreter. We were on our way to the city’s Catholic Cathedral and got sidetracked. We strayed into the old Hutong District, a labyrinth of winding streets leading to a jumble of alleys, each alley opening into a courtyard shared by several families living in traditional dwellings. Andy and Jasper were up ahead; just when Christine and I thought we had lost them, a shower of firecrackers exploded. We jumped into an alley. The men ran back to see what all the commotion was about, and Christine shouted, “It’s a Chinese wedding!” A bride and groom loomed inside the entrance like giant wedding cake toppers. She wore a scarlet Mandarin-style dress; he, a dark Western-style suit. Their entourage piled behind them as a blizzard of metallic confetti rained down on our heads. The bride and groom looked at us exactly as we might have looked at them if it had been our weddings taking place in the United States and we had found four Canadian Inuits on our doorstep, dressed in sealskins and mukluks. “You must come to our wedding,” they insisted. How could we resist? Christine explained that our appearance was considered auspicious because it was so out of the ordinary, a kind of Chinese “double happiness” symbol times two! We were made the guests of honor, and ate and drank for the next several hours in all three homes off a large, sunlit courtyard; the homes were just single rooms, really, each with a circular plywood table seating eight people. Outside, two young men flung handfuls of prawns, chicken, whole fish, pork, beef, and Chinese vegetables into sizzling woks the size of saucer sleds, producing course after course of delicious stir-fries. The homes were decorated with streamers and roses. There was a cassette player, and when it was discovered that Andy and I could waltz, the guests begged us to dance to Andy Williams’ rendition of “Moon River” — again and again. Andy and I were so wasted, our waltzing consisted mainly of holding each other up, but it was romantic; at one point, I glanced in a mirror and saw a magenta dot pasted to my cheek. When we finally left, we were hugged, toasted, and cheered. The wedding couple escorted us to the street, where I took off my zirconia studs and gave them to the bride. She was elated. I was thrust centrifugally into “right here, right now.” The memory of being whisked so dramatically into the mystery of the moment has dimmed, but the wonder is still with me. The experience now seems like the equivalent of a Buddhist teacher hitting a student on the head with a stick. Shortly after the wedding, a Chinese journalist friend introduced me to the “Tao te Ching,” a Chinese text on the art of living, written in the 6th Century BCE. We were resting on the lawn of the National Library after a bike ride, and Jing Jun pulled out a notepad and wrote down two of the book’s 81 gemlike precepts: “The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet” and “Be like water, which seeks the low places.” J.J. said the Tao was the ultimate reality, an intergalactic energy that gives rise to all creation and loves all things. You can’t know the Tao, but you can align with it. It is subtle and mysterious, but “go with the flow,” pretty well covers it: Stay in the “river,” make course corrections as needed (steer clear of logs), and do your best to ride the current, which will take you farther faster than forcing things. Let the river carry you into the mystery of the moment. Aligning with the Tao is the bedrock of my spiritual practice. The more you let go, the more real it becomes. Aligning with the Tao — letting it live you — is the same thing as Christianity’s “finding grace” to me. I think of the Tao as a kind of Fifth Fundamental Force of the Universe. The first Four — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces — are also invisible and were discovered by accident or through experimentation. Retirement has crystalized my desire to slow down. As a reporter, I lived with back-to-back deadlines; I was always rushing, undermining any attempt to live mindfully. New Tao Tenet No. 1: No rushing unless I’m trying to catch a train or plane or my house is on fire. If I rush, I may blow right by something important. I stray out of the river all the time, but when I do, I head back in and catch the current. New Tenet No. 2: Store that left, rational brain in the freezer! I don’t need it most of the time, and it too often drags me into the past or future. Staying in the right brain makes it easier to be in the now, which “is all we have” as the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says. A man I love is ill with cancer. I just found out, and it’s hard not to think dark thoughts, but I’m trying. In the past, the value of surrender and acceptance was lost on him, but people change. His last email ended, “I’ll try very hard not to get too far ahead of myself, and just let things unfold.”